Self-reliance, God-reliance, or folly?
A story my Dad loves to tell:
A very faithful man once had the misfortune to live in a flood zone. One year, with particularly heavy rainfall predicted, the local fire chief knocked on his door and said they were evacuating the neighborhood because they expected flooding soon. The faithful man smiled and said he wasn’t worried, ‘God would provide’. Soon the rain started and the streets started to flood, as the water rose the neighbors got a small raft caravan going and knocked on his door, offering a seat to the good man. Again, the man smiled and said that ‘God would provide’. Well, as luck would have it, the dam soon failed and the flooding rose so high that the man had to crawl out onto his roof. A helicopter soon spotted our poor soul and flew down to pluck him from a certain watery grave. But the man declined again, saying ‘God would provide.’ The man drowned shortly thereafter. At the pearly gates, the surprised man asked St. Peter why God hadn’t saved him. Peter should his head and said, We sent a fire chief to warn you, a neighbor to help you, and a helicopter to save you – what more did you want?!
Self-reliance as a lost art
I uploaded a video about replacing a broken shovel handle with a walnut tree branch at the top of this page. We are working at our akiya kominka and with everything on our plate we simply didn’t have time to go into town to replace the handle. So I improvised, pulled out my pocket knife and whittled out a shovel handle. If you move out to the country, almost to the edge of ‘off-grid’ you need a certain amount of self-sufficiency to get the job done. As I pointed out in the video, if you run into town every time you need just the ‘right’ tool you will break both your money bank and your time bank. The good-enough tool is sometimes, well, good enough! In a world of smartphones, TikTok, and massive consumerism – we need to cultivate the spirit of DIY and self-reliance on ourselves and our children! Flush with inspiration for writing an article, I looked up ‘self-reliance’….hmm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essay on ‘Self-Reliance’
It took all of 10 seconds of web search to find that the American philosophical strain of self-reliance is often traced to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay titled, unironically, Self Reliance. Read it! It is a quick read really, nothing 30 minutes, or a well-considered hour, can’t absorb. I have to warn you though, I found it repugnant. It came across, to me at least, with the same odious smugness of Frank Sinatra’s famous indulgence in self-adulation, ‘My Way’. A couple of quotes to demonstrate my point: “Man is his own star” -or how about – “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
A far cry from Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, And desperately wicked; Who can know it?”
Is Self-reliance good or bad?
So on one hand we have the DIY/Maker movement that embraces self-reliance as a way of life, working with your hands and being able to do things yourself. Not having to call a tow truck to change a flat, making handles out of tree branches, living off-grid, etc., etc. And on the other, we have a philosophical movement of self-reliance that is completely wrapped up in the godhead of self, a decidedly un-Christian, narcissistic philosophy.
I think it is pretty clear that we have a divergence in meaning. Self-reliance as a pursuit of competence and skill is VERY different than a philosophy of narcissistic self-pursuit.
But it is worth unpacking this a little
A lot of homeschool parents consciously try to teach self-reliance to their children, myself included. We teach gardening to grow our own food, water purification, animal husbandry, hunting/fishing, and wildcrafting. Our children are learning woodworking, blacksmithing, basic foundry, whittling, and carving – all in the name of giving them useful and valuable skills so they can be free and independent – not subservient to the web of artificiality that seems to have ensnared the entire globe. But what are we teaching them to DO with these skills?
Full Circle
The drowned man in my Dad’s story up top was waiting for God to help him. He thought he was demonstrating God-reliance, waiting for God to reach down His hand and pluck him from danger – but he wasn’t ready to recognize God’s hand right in front of him!
1 Corinthians 12:12-27: There is one body, but it has many parts. But all its many parts make up one body. It is the same with Christ.
All the people that tried to help the man were a part of the body of Christ, the body of God. The fire chief that warned him, the neighbor that tried to help him, and the helicopter pilot that tried to save him – all of them had well-developed skills and abilities that they had trained and honed to HELP OTHERS! To be an effective part of the body of Christ.
A philosophy of service to others:
So the goal should not be teaching our children the philosophy of self-reliance, the philosophy that says I must be able to do everything for ME. Instead, let us instill in our children the importance of these ‘self-reliance’ skills in the service of others. We don’t just change our own tires, we stop and help someone else stranded roadside. Our gardens don’t just feed ourselves, but are given to food banks, that elderly couple that can’t get out easily, or just handed out to our neighbors to build a sense of community. The skills learned under the heading of ‘self-reliance’ were not given to you for your own private benefit. You are given those skills to be used in the service of the body of Christ. To be that blessing, that angel, that somebody desperately needs but has no expectation of receiving. In short, to be a miracle when one is needed.
